Editorials: Where I rant to the wall about politics. And sometimes the wall rants back.

Should people dismantle their life’s work, to enter politics?

Jerry Stratton, November 30, 2016

“Sorry, son. You can’t grow up to be president unless you get rid of the family business.”—the political class

“Have you considered majoring in Politics?”

I went into November 8 determined to be happy whatever the outcome. If Hillary Clinton won, well, divided government is usually good for the economy as long as Republicans hold the House, which they were going to do. And if Donald Trump won, it would be a good and well-deserved black eye for the political establishment. One very good result of his election is that he punctured the class ceiling. He’s not from the political class, and it’s a good thing that people from outside the political class can still be elected to high office without turning “politics” into their career. But the political establishment obviously doesn’t think so. In the short run they’re trying to overturn the results of the election, and in the long term they’re trying to build some walls of their own to keep the political class safe.

Asking people to give up their family businesses in order to get into politics is one of those walls. They want to keep successful businesspeople on the other side of the political wall, and they want any businessperson who crosses it to pay for that wall. Trump’s holdings are much bigger than the average family business, but it’s still a family business; and for that matter the more successful a business is, the more important it is to its creators to hand it down to their children.

The members of the political class, politicians especially, usually have portfolios rather than businesses, because that’s how corruption works, and even when it isn’t corruption, that’s how investing works for political funds. It is relatively easy to put a portfolio into a blind trust.1

Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, the Democrat who is introducing a resolution “insisting that President-elect Donald Trump sell off his business”, had earlier defended Hillary Clinton’s routing all official emails through the Clinton Foundation, and then deleting them to avoid public records access, as just another way people communicate.

“People have different ways of communicating,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. “I have a granddaughter who does nothing but text. You’ll never find a letter written with her. So everybody’s different.”

At the same time, those close to the former president said they would be reluctant to see him back away from charitable work that has provided a source of AIDS treatment for 1.4 million people, a major engine in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases and sponsorship of anti-obesity programs in American schools.

“The Clinton Foundation is not the same as the Clinton personal bank account,” said Thomas E. Mann, a Brookings Institution expert on ethics and governance. “It’s a nonprofit entity. It has an extraordinary involvement in a whole set of public activities.”

Norm Eisen, another signature on the ethicist letter2 and a major donor to the Clinton Foundation before being appointed Ambassador to the Czech Republic3, earlier this year argued that replacing all of the Clintons on the Clinton Foundation came with too many costs for the foundation, and that Chelsea Clinton was the best choice for managing the Clinton Foundation post-election.

He also noted that the foundation’s reorganization go above and beyond what ethics rules would require if Clinton wins.

Foundations, corrupt or not, are what the political class uses, and this ad hoc rule is about keeping government in the hands of the political class, not about corruption. That’s why Trump’s family business must be dismantled, but the Clinton Foundation would have been fine. They’re two completely different things: one’s a tool of the political class, and one isn’t.

Claudia Dumas, President and CEO of Transparency International-USA, who is also calling for the full removal of the Trump family from the Trump family business, gave, as part of Transparency International, an Integrity Award in 2012 to then-Secretary of State Clinton “for her emphasis on the importance of increasing transparency and countering corruption as part of U.S. foreign policy”. When Clinton tried to use this award as evidence that the Clinton Foundation was transparent and integrous, Dumas claimed that Transparency Internationaldoesn’t even look at the foundations run by the recipients of their awards for transparency and integrity. They are, after all, focused on government transparency. Not transparency by people in government. Unless they own a business. Or something.

If you make your money by talking rather than by doing, it may sound sane to put your savings in a blind trust, even savings consisting of investments. But a businessperson doesn’t look at their business like an investor looks at their portfolio. A family business especially. They worked, hard, to build those businesses up. Requiring that you sell your family business, not even pass it to your kids but dismantle it, is something only someone who wants to enter the political class and never leave it would be willing to do.

Which is the point. It’s designed to keep the political class secure. You can hear it in statements like this from Bradford Malt, a Boston lawyer “who served as trustee for Mitt Romney’s blind trusts”:

Selling such a large pool of assets all at once may not be ideal, Malt acknowledged. But, “Nobody asked him to be president. He made his choice.”

In fact, half of America asked him to be president. What Malt means is that no one in the political class asked him. And no one in the political class wants him.

And the idea the establishment is suddenly putting forth that the founders wanted to require politicians to give up their family business is complete bullshit. It cuts against the very idea of citizen government the founders created. They didn’t expect elected office to be a full-time job. George Washington didn’t sell his family farm. He retired to it, voluntarily, after two terms, perhaps the single most important act in the early Republic. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the next three presidents and all founders, likewise returned to farming after they left politics. James Monroe sold his farm during the first year of his presidency, but that was likely to pay debts and had nothing to do with any constitutional requirement.

John Quincy Adams, the first post-founder president, is also the first president to remain in politics after the presidency. He moved to the House of Representatives for seventeen years before he died. He was the first president for whom politics was a career. As far as I can tell, he didn’t even have a career from before politics to return to.

Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, returned to his family farm, which he had left to his son to manage in his absence, after his two terms as president.

Calling for Trump to not just leave his family business, but also to take it away from the rest of his family, is just a way to enforce a professional political class. While on the surface it discourages people who have successfully created their own business from running for politics it also encourages those who don’t care about their family business. And if that wall fails, it hopes to subvert them into becoming a permanent part of the political class.

In response to Election 2016: Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

Though if it consists of businesses you have personally helped build, personally helped fund, or even just stock from a small number of businesses you’ve personally chosen, that’s not easy to forget, either.

Clinton Foundation

“There are two Twitter streams that appeared last night that may not be helpful in figuring it out, but at least they frame both sides of the debate. These are the arguments on either side. The first comes from Judd Legum, the Editor in Chief for ThinkProgress and the Senior Vice President for Communications at American Progress. He’s a liberal, if that weren’t obvious.”

“The Clinton Foundation’s vague timetable to limit its involvement with overseas programs, and its insistence that Chelsea Clinton remain on its board, raise red flags for ethics watchdogs even as the charity vows to avoid conflicts of interest in a Hillary Clinton presidency.” (Memeorandum thread)

“As President-elect Barack Obama moved closer to making Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton his choice for secretary of state, independent legal experts said unwinding some of the most nettlesome conflicts involving her husband’s global fundraising would prove extraordinarily complicated.”

“TI-USA presented its 2012 TI-USA Integrity Award to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her emphasis on the importance of increasing transparency and countering corruption as part of U.S. foreign policy, with the award addressed solely to those contributions.”

President Donald Trump

“Senate Democrats plan to file legislation next week insisting that President-elect Donald Trump sell off his business stakes and place his assets in a blind trust—or they will treat all his business dealings as potential violations of the Constitution.”

“Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.” (Memeorandum thread)

“The president-elect should put all assets that may pose potential conflicts of interest in a true blind trust, run by an independent trustee. The family of the president-elect should not control the Trump businesses while he is in office,” according to the group’s president, Claudia Dumas.

If politics has become so complicated that only a political class can manage it, then Democracy is dead. Citizens should not be allowed to become politicians, nor should they be allowed to vote for which politicians take office.

For the 2015 Mitt Romney Day, the award goes to a pundit who worked at a high level in one administration, telling another pundit his opinion doesn’t count because he worked at a low level in another administration.

The Democratic candidate for president blamed a 2012 concussion for her inability to remember what is and is not classified information, and how classified information should be handled, despite a decade of training on congressional committees and at the State Department.

Both Weinstein and Spacey got a pass for a long time. We know more about Weinstein because he was caught earlier, and that’s it. Maybe it’s past time to drain the swamps of Hollywood, the entertainment industry in general, and similar cultures of deception such as in Washington DC.

You know, the funny thing is, how lousy most of your lies are. You tell violent lies, you tell dirty lies, you tell scurrilous lies about conservative families. But most of your lies are not very good, are they? Funny that so many smart people can work so hard on lies, and spend all that money on them, and, what do you think it is? It must be the money. It turns everything to crap.

When you’ve dismantled every other defense, what’s left except the whining? The fact is, Democrats can easily defend against Trump over-using the power of the presidency. They don’t want to, because they want that power intact when they get someone in.

Too often in politics, we pretend that the principled act is to cut the baby in half. Governor Sarah Palin refuses that compromise. Her ambitions for success were for the success of reform in Alaska. She did what she needed to do to ensure that those reforms survive.

From Lincoln on, Democrats have accused Republicans of their own failings: hate speech, violence, madness. And the more the left recycles the same serpent’s lies they used against President Lincoln, the more the left turns Trump into the new Lincoln.